Influence of Participation in Self-Help Groups on the Socio-Economic Empowerment of Women in Tigania West Sub-County, Meru County, Kenya

Abstract

Women’s participation in self-help groups’ activities aims mostly towards their empowerment. In Tigania West Sub-county, there was insufficient empirical literature that could be used to enhance support for the self-help groups by development agencies. The purpose of this study was to establish the influence of participation in self-help groups on socio-economic empowerment of women. The study was guided by the family systems theory. Women groups that had been in operation for a minimum of four years and registered with the Ministry of Labour and Social Protection, Department of social Development were considered. The study used descriptive and exploratory research design. This was important in enabling an objective description of the items as they are on the ground without any manipulation. The explorative research design on the other hand was key in enabling an exploration of relationships among variables. The target population was all women in self-help groups in Tigania West Sub-County in which accessible population was 3610 women from 25 registered self-help groups. A sample size of 150 was selected through stratified simple random sampling. The study results indicated that participation in the women self-help groups had an influence on the self-confidence of the women. This was due to a positive beta coefficient of 0.252 with a p value of 0.000. The results of the regression indicated that participation in women self-help groups led to an increase in level of social networks due to a positive beta coefficient of 0.380. The pvalue less than 0.05 (significance level) indicates that participation in self-help groups has statistically significant influence on their social networks. The results indicated that women participation in self-help groups had positive influence on credit access of the women. The p-value less than 0.05 (significance level) indicates that participation in self-help groups has statistically significant influence on their income. The conclusion was participation in self-help groups helped in improving on the confidence of the group members, social networks of the self-group members, credit access and level of income amongst women in self-help groups. The study recommends that participation in women self-help groups can be improved through sensitization and empowerment in agricultural activities and the capacity for the women in the self-help group should be enhanced for decision making on the financial management and entrepreneurship aspects. The study further recommended that women groups to diversify their sources of income to ensure that they are not over dependent on agricultural activities.